Friday, August 30, 2013

Last night, thanks to the wonderful generosity of Merriol's friend and fine children's author Barry Hutchison (go buy his books), I got to go see a hero of mine in the flesh... and talk to him.... an' everyfink!

The hero is Neil Gaiman (not, unfortunately, a friend of Merriol's*) a fine author (go buy his books too).

Barry had a couple of tickets to the last stop of Mr Gaiman's marathon book (The Ocean at the End of the Lane) promotion tour which took place in Inverness. Barry couldn't go so Holly and I did. On the way out of the house we picked up a few of Neil Gaiman's books with the hope that we could ask him to sign a couple: my ancient edition of the annotated script of his Babylon 5 script Day of the Dead, Merriol's copy of Stardust and Daisy's copy of Coraline. (I planned of getting to Waterstone's in Inverness in time to buy a copy of the new book too.)

We got there very early - but long after Waterstone's had shut; damn! - and took our places. We had insanely good seats in the second row; B6 and B7. I sat in B6. After a while both Holly and I started reading the books we had bought with us. She read Coraline. I read the Babylon 5 script. A couple of pages into it I realised that whoever had paid for the seat next to me hadn't turned up yet. So I bumped myself across a seat and read the rest of the B5 script - sitting on seat B5.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

One of the nice things about having kids is the way they can constantly surprise you in new and interesting ways. Last night for instance, climbing into bed, I was delighted/bemused to find that a lot of Daleks were having a tea dance on my bedside table.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Sorting through the pictures on my phone today, between the endless number of blurry accidental shots of table tops, floors, and huge pink blobs that may well be one or more of my fingers: and the endless number of blurry photographs of my kids moments after they stopped doing that cute or interesting thing, I came across these. A few pictures where I actually managed to record - albeit badly - the thing I wanted to record:

I cannot conceive of any situation where I would only need five 100mm round wire nails. (That's 4" in old money.) In the real world nails come in big bags or buckets. You buy them by weight; by the kilo, and you just keep using them till the job is done. Hammer! Hammer! Hammer! "Is that going to fall down? No? Well, let's just whack in a few more just to be on the safe side..." Hammer! Hammer! Hammer! No-one I have ever met (in or out of the building trade) who knows which end of the hammer you blow down has planned a job so meticulously that they know they'll only need five nails.

The only possible situation that comes to mind where exactly five 100mm round wire nails might be of use is the unlikely situation that you are given (or find) a whole boxful of five different kinds of packets of shrink wrapped nails and you want somewhere to hang them on a wall.

Here's yet another attempt to sell empty cardboard boxes to numpties with no imagination:

And a couple of classic charity shop apostrophe abuse's

This one from The PDSA in Fort William:

And this from Mary's Meals in Oban:

Mind you, this is the same shop that has a shelfful (is that a real word?) of knick-nacks labled:

About Me

I have all these bits of paper, backs of envelopes, sides of cardboard boxes, anything flat and blank enough to scribble on, full of half-drawn, stupid cartoons and idiot poems lying around.
For years I have been saying I must get round to doing something with them. For years I have been meaning to get to grips with learning how to drive our ancient vector graphics tools.
For years my wife has been wondering how it takes me so long to see the blindingly obvious.
I can't see the blindingly obvious most of the time because I'm usually drawing fish wearing platform shoes.